No better farewell and good riddance tribute could be offered from the theatre world to that vintage performance artist, Tony Blair, than this ingenious Jacobean farce by Ben Jonson.

For The Alchemist, as Nicholas Hytner's ingeniously modernised and stylised, contemporary-dress production keeps reminding us, celebrates the suave confidence trickster, or the brilliant actor-performer, like Mr Blair, who knows how to pull fine wool over people's eyes to stop them seeing the whole truth or the inconvenient parts.

It may sound crazy to set about updating a farce like The Alchemist. After all, Jonson's play is firmly locked into its own period. This dramatist's erudite language and frame of reference often make The Alchemist sound intimidatingly distant and obscure in a way Shakespeare does not.

What's more The Alchemist's hopeful deceivers - Simon Russell Beale's endearing butler-turned-housekeeper, who goes by the name of Face and convincingly puts on three different ones, Alex Jennings's deliciously amusing freelance pimp, Subtle, with his little repertoire of false identities, and Lesley Manville's Dol Common, who comes packed with sexual promise and promises - are all involved in the defunct art of alchemy.

Their scam is to set Subtle up as a triumphant alchemist. He will tantalise his gullible, greedy clients with the Philosopher's Stone which, will turn base metal into gold and like an elixir do away with disease, make the old eternally young and allow the impotent to rise up again: no wonder Ian Richardson, in top comic and vocal form as the ancient voluptuary, Sir Epicure Mammon, speaks in a narcissistic swoon of fantasising and monomania as he dreams of bringing riches, luxury and lots of sex back into his life.

You may guess by now why Hytner persuades us The Alchemist works in modern dress. For our own age is engaged, like Jonson's, in hot pursuit of easy money (or gold), longs for eternal youth and puts its faith in cosmetic surgery and botox.

Besides those who seek Subtle and his alchemical magic, like the tobacconist Abel Drugger, the Puritan pastor Ananias, the angry boy Kastril and Dapper, the clerk with a passion for gambling, would all be at home in our own London. Both the deceivers and the deceived, like Tim McMullan's versatile Surly, who transforms himself into a Spanish Papist, adopt serious disguises.

Unfortunately Mark Thompson's oddish design, on a revolve stage, with an open room, flights of stairs and a perimeter area with neighbouring front doors, misses the right claustrophobic sense. And Hytner does not disguise the fact that this farce loses vital momentum in the meandering second half.

An artful brand of deception and role-play rises initially in a comic spiral of complexity. The modern-dress performances brim with vitality. Jennings's estuary-accented wide boy Subtle sets the deceptions going in a comedy classic performance. Hilariously got up as an American hippie, with headscarf, beads and a voice of glazed, camp affectation, or white-gowned and tranquil, he oozes a grave, misleading sincerity.

Russell Beale delights and deftly bridges class divides thanks to speedy costume changes: his bearded, bewigged and blazered naval captain turns servile and German in overalls and ends up gaily domestic, while Manville's Dol Common, in her pearls, high heels and genteel voice, efficiently seduces. A timeless farce reclaimed.